Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [82]
My foot comes down onto something soft.
Sick squirm under my shoe.
I choke in a gasp, stagger back. For a second I’ve lost the floor.
Then, as my shoe comes down again—solid ground—there’s a click and suddenly, light.
I’m in a chamber at the end of the line. Walls full of white Christmas lights. Hanging in swags like the piping of sweet on a birthday cake.
And all up and down and ceiling to floor: pretty jewelry.
At first I can’t make it out, it’s just an enormous, blurred luster. But bring it into focus, and it’s gold and more gold, like an Egyptian tomb—gold all pressed into the walls—gold and silver and the crazy shimmer colors of thousands of jewels. Mosaics of rings, overlapped bracelets, winding chains, strings of pearls. I reach my hand out to touch. Stop.
Directly ahead, Dorothy in her faded housedress and blue velvet hat is hunched, face close to the wall, hands working. Her humming is so low I barely hear it. She has a little tube of glue. She presses something into the wall. Face smattered with beaded light and twinkle, and she turns and looks at me and smiles.
Crooked eyes dip down. To the diamonds in my ears, the drapes of pearls against my chest.
The glint in her hand is my ring.
I don’t hear a sound from behind.
I don’t hear the swift of the baseball bat before it comes down.
LILA
BY MEGAN KRUSE
Powell Boulevard
When I saw Lila for the first time it was at the Tik Tok, at a quarter past 2 in the morning. I was there because I had this terrible loneliness in me and I couldn’t stand to be in my apartment, where the cars outside on Foster Road dragged their headlights over the thin walls. There was black mold on the shower curtain and the linoleum was peeling up and there was an ugly stain on the mattress. It didn’t matter; I slept on the sofa anyway.
I slept on the sofa and when I couldn’t sleep I sat in the Tik Tok near Powell Boulevard, watching the rows of clocks on the walls, and then Lila came in, late on a Friday night. She was tall, with rust-colored hair, and she looked like a girl I had known once, the daughter of someone who came to take care of my mother after her accident. The girl was my age and she had a puppy that she carried, with ragged, chewed-up fur, scratching its fleas and burying its head under her arm. I was eleven. I tied a red scarf around my head because I wanted to look like a soldier who had just returned from war. I dreamt the girl would hold a rag to my forehead and whisper carefully in my ear.
While her mother took care of my mother, the girl slept in the room next to mine. When she outgrew one of her dresses it was folded, washed, and put on my bed. It was blue, terry cloth, a summer dress. I wore it until I could hold it in my hands and see right through.
But then my mother was well enough and the woman left and took the girl with her. My mother sometimes stood and walked around, and changed her clothes, but her eyes were blank as marbles and her mouth was slack. Sometimes she sat and played the accordion but it was always the same wheezing note. She kept a fifth of whiskey in the top drawer of her dresser and when she slept on the recliner I would sip from it, lie in her bed, and imagine that girl. Her blue dress like water, like a calm and perfect sea.
Lila came into the Tik Tok that night and I watched her for a long time. She was beautiful. She folded and refolded her napkin, looked around as though she was waiting for someone. After ten minutes a tall man came in and sat at the table and I heard him call her by her name. It was a beautiful name, I thought. He sat there for a bit and they spoke quietly. Then he stood up and left.
I waited awhile and ordered a fried egg so that I could ask her if she wanted some food. Maybe she was hungry, I thought, and didn’t have enough money, or maybe she couldn’t decide what she wanted. I moved into her booth. She didn’t look up.
“Listen,” she said, “I’m not a dyke. I don’t lick pussy so probably you should just go back to your eggs.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I replied. At that moment it